A Guidebook for City and County Managers: Meeting Today’s Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by James M. Bourey: “Whether you are a student preparing for a career in public administration, a mid-career professional manager or a seasoned veteran, A Guidebook for City and County Managers provides policy guidance and advice to local governmental challenges and issues.

Assuming a knowledge of the basics of public management, James M. Bourey provides real-world recommendations for issues managers are facing this decade and beyond. Relying on experience from his long career in local government in chief executive positions in city, county and regional council management in locations throughout the United States, Bourey outlines the best approaches to the most critical issues for local governments. The book is comprehensive in its breadth of subject matter yet targeted in the recommendations that focus on the most critical issues. Social equity, environmental protection and global warming, good fiscal management, adequate public infrastructure and active citizen engagement are important themes throughout.

Merely being an administrative caretaker is not sufficient; managers must have the knowledge of ways to improve their communities and take the initiative to enhance the quality of life of its residents. Making a difference is both the reason for the job and its reward. This book helps provide a roadmap for the journey…(More)”.

How Tech Despair Can Set You Free

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Samuel Matlack: “One way to look at the twentieth century is to say that nations may rise and fall but technical progress remains forever. Its sun rises on the evil and on the good, and its rain falls on the just and on the unjust. Its sun can be brighter than a thousand suns, scorching our enemies, but, with some time and ingenuity, it can also power air conditioners and 5G. One needs to look on the bright side, living by faith and not by sight.

The century’s inquiring minds wished to know whether this faith in progress is meaningfully different from blindness. Ranking high among those minds was the French historian, sociologist, and lay theologian Jacques Ellul, and his answer was simple: No.

In America, Ellul became best known for his book The Technological Society. The book’s signature term was “technique,” an idea he developed throughout his vast body of writing. Technique is the social structure on which modern life is built. It is the consciousness that has come to govern all human affairs, suppressing questions of ultimate human purposes and meaning. Our society no longer asks why we should do anything. All that matters anymore, Ellul argued, is how to do it — to which the canned answer is always: More efficiently! Much as a modern machine can be said to run on its own, so does the technological society. Human control of it is an illusion, which means we are on a path to self-destruction — not because the social machine will necessarily kill us (although it might), but because we are fast becoming soulless creatures…(More)”.

The giant plan to track diversity in research journals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Holly Else & Jeffrey M. Perkel: “In the next year, researchers should expect to face a sensitive set of questions whenever they send their papers to journals, and when they review or edit manuscripts. More than 50 publishers representing over 15,000 journals globally are preparing to ask scientists about their race or ethnicity — as well as their gender — in an initiative that’s part of a growing effort to analyse researcher diversity around the world. Publishers say that this information, gathered and stored securely, will help to analyse who is represented in journals, and to identify whether there are biases in editing or review that sway which findings get published. Pilot testing suggests that many scientists support the idea, although not all.

The effort comes amid a push for a wider acknowledgement of racism and structural racism in science and publishing — and the need to gather more information about it. In any one country, such as the United States, ample data show that minority groups are under-represented in science, particularly at senior levels. But data on how such imbalances are reflected — or intensified — in research journals are scarce. Publishers haven’t systematically looked, in part because journals are international and there has been no measurement framework for race and ethnicity that made sense to researchers of many cultures.

“If you don’t have the data, it is very difficult to understand where you are at, to make changes, set goals and measure progress,” says Holly Falk-Krzesinski, vice-president of research intelligence at the Dutch publisher Elsevier, who is working with the joint group and is based in Chicago, Illinois.

In the absence of data, some scientists have started measuring for themselves. Computational researchers are scouring the literature using software that tries to estimate racial and ethnic diversity across millions of published research articles, and to examine biases in who is represented or cited. Separately, over the past two years, some researchers have criticized publishers for not having diversity data already, and especially for being slow to collate information about small groups of elite decision makers: journal editors and editorial boards. At least one scientist has started publicizing those numbers himself….(More)”.

A little less conversation, a little more action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Mariana Mazzucato, Rainer Kattel and Rowan Conway: “The risk with any new economic movement is that it remains closed within the confines of high level academic and conceptual debates — which sadly then forms part of the “blah blah blah” rather than moving policy practice forward. At IIPP, we never wanted to advocate for policy from an Ivory tower. From the day we started, we got our hands dirty and worked with policymakers in practice to co-design new tools and frameworks for inclusive, healthy and sustainable growth. While bold economics research is crucial, the work ‘on the ground’ with public organisations is equally critical in order to change public policy practice and so we have been exploring practical ways to translate this new economic thinking into policy change at the place or institutional level.

This has included a wide range of deep dives that ultimately led to the Mission-Oriented Horizon 2020 programme and policy guidance for the EU. This guidance then unlocked funding for research and innovation across members states, the MOIIS commission that drove challenge-oriented innovation and industrial strategy into UK government, and our work with the Scottish Government that helped to develop and launch a new mission-oriented national bank (Scottish National Investment Bank). Since then, we have worked on more deep dives with our growing MOIN network and other policy-making bodies — at a city level in Camden in London and Biscay region of Spain, in national and regional governments in British Columbia, Canada, South Africa, Denmark, New Zealand and Sweden — as well as with key public institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the BBC where we developed an evaluation framework to measure dynamic public value.

Practice-based theorising in action

These deep dives are not simply standard academic or think tank round tables — they are what we call “practice-based theorising”. This means taking insights from pioneering research, enabling co-creation and setting a route to implementation when it comes to policy, and by using participatory research, engagement and design processes to bridge the gap between theory and practice. It is this collaborative work with policymakers that makes IIPP different. Through practice-based theorising our researchers bring new theories to policymakers, not just offering a theoretical stance but engaging, experimenting and evolving these concepts in practice. Through deep dives we have learned a great deal from practice and these lessons then feed back into the theory itself, and ultimately into what we teach through our Masters in Public Administration.

Practice-based theorising takes artful engagement of cross-disciplinary actors in multiple sectors and places. Using dynamic research methods, participatory co-design workshops and rapid prototyping, we learn from the places we work in and translate IIPP’s key economic theories into testable policy innovations. We also teach our MPA students many of the participatory design processes we deploy via our MPA module called “Transformation by Design” which acts as the connecting tissue between the taught course and the placement semester within our policymaking network organisations….(More)”

New Days Future Kit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toolbox by the Danish Design Center: “The New Days’ Future Kit is a toolbox with guides, materials, and visual tools that make it possible to bring diverse groups together to work experimentally, concretely, and co-creatively with aging and care of the future.

An essential part of the kit is the collection of speculative fragments from the future that consist of small glimpses, artifacts, and tales. The physical version contains actual versions of the artifacts and materials. These are introduced and used actively in workshops with us.

The toolkit is relevant for anyone working in the public or private sector with care. The digital version of the toolkit presented here is meant as an inspiration. The elements will provoke you and challenge your thoughts and ambitions for the future of care. If the tools make you curious, reach out to us and we’ll arrange a targeted workshop for you.

The toolbox results from a long-running process of exploring and learning from alternative and desirable futures and translating the insights into innovative experiments in the present…(More)”.

The Summit for Democracy commitments are out—now what?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Norman Eisen, Mario Picon, Robin J. Lewis, Renzo Falla, and Lilly Blumenthal: “On February 14, 2022, two months after the first Summit for Democracy, the U.S. Department of State released written commitments from 56 governments focused on strengthening democracy, combatting corruption, and defending human rights. Now the post-summit Year of Action can begin in earnest. As two of us discussed in a post right after the Summit, for the event to achieve its objectives, civil society, the private sector, and other good governance champions must work with and hold governments accountable for the implementation of concrete, measurable, and meaningful commitments.

From our initial survey, we observe significant variation in terms of the specificity and nature of commitments published thus far. Here, we offer a brief snapshot of the distribution of countries with published commitments, the range of those commitments, and their significance. Our initial reactions are preliminary; this post offers a roadmap for the deeper reading and analysis of the commitments that we and many others will undertake.

The countries that have submitted written commitments to date fall along the spectrum of governance regimes, as defined by the recently released Democracy Index 2021 from the Economist Intelligence Unit. 53 of 167 countries featured in the index provided written commitments with clear over-representation of those classified as full democracies—18 out of 21 full democracies submitted commitments. Meanwhile, 26 out of 53 countries considered flawed democracies submitted commitments. An even smaller group of hybrid regimes (that is, ones that combine democratic and autocratic features; 8 out of 34 countries) and a minuscule proportion of countries under what are considered authoritarian regimes (1 out of 59 countries) responded to the call for written commitments.

Among these submissions, the nature of the commitments varies. Most countries offer some commitments on the domestic front, but many, particularly the full democracies, focus on the international arena. As examples, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s commitments include “organizing elections within constitutional deadlines,” while New Zealand’s include a pledge of “1 million NZD to support anti-corruption within the Pacific region.”…(More)”.

Russian disinformation frenzy seeds groundwork for Ukraine invasion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zachary Basu and Sara Fischer at Axios: “Russia is testing its agility at weaponizing state media to win backing at home, in occupied territories in eastern Ukraine and with sympathizers abroad for a war of aggression.

The big picture: State media has pivoted from accusing the West of hysterical warnings about a non-existent invasion to pumping out minute-by-minute coverage of the tensions.

Zoom in: NewsGuard, a misinformation tech firm, identified three of the most common false narratives being propagated by Russian state media like RT, Sputnik News, and TASS:

  1. The West staged a coup in 2014 to overthrow the Ukrainian government
  2. Ukrainian politics is dominated by Nazi ideology
  3. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine’s Donbas region have been subjected to genocide

Between the lines: Social media platforms have been on high alert for Russian disinformation that would violate their policies but have less control over private messaging, where some propaganda efforts have moved to avoid detection.

  • A Twitter spokesperson notes: “As we do around major global events, our safety and integrity teams are monitoring for potential risks associated with conflicts to protect the health of the platform.”
  • YouTube’s threat analysis group and trust and safety teams have also been closely monitoring the situation in Ukraine. The platform’s policies ban misleading titles, thumbnails or descriptions that trick users into believing the content is something it is not….(More)”.

The World Uncertainty Index

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom & Davide Furceri: “We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the Gulf War, the Euro debt crisis, the Brexit vote and the COVID pandemic. The level of uncertainty is higher in developing countries but is more synchronized across advanced economies with their tighter trade and financial linkages. In a panel vector autoregressive setting we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output. This effect is larger and more persistent in countries with lower institutional quality, and in sectors with greater financial constraints…(More)”.

The committeefication of collective action in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Caroline Archambault and David Ehrhardt: “Over the last century, Africa has witnessed considerable committeefication, a process by which committees have become increasingly important to organise collective action. Throughout the continent, committees have come to preside over everything from natural resource management to cultural life, and from peacebuilding to community consultation. What has been the impact of this dramatic institutional change on the nature and quality of collective action? Drawing on decades of anthropological research and development work in East Africa – studying, working with and working in committees of various kinds – this article presents an approach to addressing this question.

We show how committees have surface features as well as deep functions, and that the impact of committeefication depends not only on their features and functions but also on the pathways through which they proliferate. On the surface, committees aim for inclusive and deliberative decision making, even if they vary in the specifics of their missions, membership, decision-making rules, and level of autonomy. But their deep functions can be quite different: a façade for accessing recognition or resources; a classroom for learning leadership skills; or a club for elites to pursue their shared interests. The impact of these features and functions depends on the pathways through which they grow: autonomous from existing forms of collective action; in synergistic cooperation; or in competition, possibly weakening or even destroying existing local institutions.

Community-based development interventions often rely heavily on committeefied collective action. This paper identifies the benefits that this strategy can have, but also shows its potential to weaken or even destroy existing forms of collective action. On that basis, we suggest that it is imperative to turn more systematic analytical attention to committees, and assess the extent to which they are delivering development or crippling collective action in the guise of democracy and deliberation…(More)”.

This Is the Difference Between a Family Surviving and a Family Sinking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bryce Covert: “…The excitement around policymaking is almost always in the moments after ink dries on a bill creating something new. But if a benefit fails to reach the people it’s designed for, it may as well not exist at all. Making government benefits more accessible and efficient doesn’t usually get the spotlight. But it’s often the difference between a family getting what it needs to survive and falling into hardship and destitution. It’s the glue of our democracy.

President Biden appears to have taken note of this. Late last year, he issued an executive order meant to improve the “customer experience and service delivery” of the entire federal government. He put forward some ideas, including moving Social Security benefit claims and passport renewals online, reducing paperwork for student loan forgiveness and certifying low-income people for all the assistance they qualify for at once, rather than making them seek out benefits program by program. More important, he shifted the focus of government toward whether or not the customers — that’s us — are having a good experience getting what we deserve.

It’s a direction all lawmakers, from the federal level down to counties and cities, should follow.

One of the biggest barriers to government benefits is all of the red tape to untangle, particularly for programs that serve low-income people. They were the ones wrangling with the I.R.S.’s nonfiler portal while others got their payments automatically. Benefits delivered through the tax code, which flow so easily that many people don’t think of them as government benefits at all, mostly help the already well-off. Programs for the poor, on the other hand, tend to be bloated with barriers like income tests, work requirements and in-person interviews. It’s not just about applying once, either; many require people to continually recertify, going through the process over and over again.

The hassle doesn’t just cost time and effort. It comes with a psychological cost. “You get mad at the D.M.V. because it takes hours to do something that should only take minutes,” Pamela Herd, a sociologist at Georgetown, said. “These kind of stresses can be really large when you’re talking about people who are on a knife’s edge in terms of their ability to pay their rent or feed their children.”…(More)”.